


Home Away From Home

by Wordweaver



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Complete, Family, Friendship, Gen, Homesickness, Korean War, Letters Home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-01-27
Packaged: 2017-11-27 02:39:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/657148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wordweaver/pseuds/Wordweaver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawkeye writes his first letter home to his father.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home Away From Home

**Author's Note:**

> I'm aiming this to be one of a series of fics (if folks like this first one!) on the general theme of the relationship between Hawkeye and his father, told via their letters and/or character POVs. There's something about the father/son relationship in the series which drew me in, particularly given the real-life close relationship between Alan Alda and his own father Robert, who guest-stars in a couple of episodes.
> 
> For the purpose of my fics I'm going with the later TV series canon-ish structure that Hawkeye was an only child; and that his mother died when he was young, so he and Daniel were closer than the average father and son of the time. A little bit of my invented backstory for Daniel has him serving as a surgeon with the US army during 1943 - 1945, working in a field hospital in the south Pacific theatre.

**October 1950 - Korea**

 

Dear Dad,

 

Well, here I am in downtown Korea. It’s everything the army promised it would be: exotic, exciting, full of local colour. Mainly in different shades of khaki. Everyone’s in uniform around here and there’s this quaint custom of saluting which I’ve so far successfully managed to avoid picking up.

 

I arrived at the 4077 MASH ten days ago, after being driven for four hours down a road that left me in need spinal surgery. When our jeep bumped into camp I did a doubletake: _this_ is where I’m going to be spending the next twelve months? It looked like a three-ring circus that had lost two of its rings and then had a tornado whip through. There’s a ramshackle hospital building (in fact, to call it ramshackle is an insult to rams and shackles), CO’s office and kitchen: everything else is in tents. Mess tent, shower tent, supply tent – the army does a great line in tents. Available in all shades of khaki, genuine antique WW2 surplus. Like many other things here, as I’m beginning to find out.

 

Anyway, I get out of the jeep and stand there unkinking my spine and thinking unkind thoughts about the army, when someone clears their throat behind me. I look round to see a kid of a corporal who about comes up to my elbow, peering up at me through glasses that look like they were last cleaned when he inherited them from his grandpa several years ago. He flings off a salute and asks me if I’m Captain Pierce, to which I admit (not having a better story prepared). He then proceeds to give me a whistle-stop tour of the camp’s highlights, which takes all of five minutes. At last we come to a halt outside a tent which has not only seen better days but better centuries, and the kid – who I’ve since learned goes by the enigmatic name of Radar O’Reilly – informs me that this is my home away from home. He has the decency to look apologetic about it, before slinging my bags in through the door – which is adorned by a sign bearing the unpromising name _The Swamp_ \- and scuttling off to do whatever it is army corporals do when they’re not showing reluctant army doctors around their new accommodation.

 

Inside the tent there are four army cots, a stove, assorted packing crates doing time as furniture and an abundance of manly clutter which suggests that my new bunkies are relaxed about housekeeping standards. For lack of anything better to do I unpack my stuff into an empty footlocker, lay down on what looks like a spare cot and stare at the stains on the canvas ceiling for a while.

 

What happens next is that I meet two of the people I’ll be spending a lot of time with here, so I’ll draw you a picture of the whole scene, Dad.

 

I don’t get to spend too long in my homesick funk before I hear humans approaching across the compound: footsteps, and two voices raised in lively debate. The tent door creaks open and my bunkies enter, still in mid-argument. I’m miserable enough to want to be distracted, so I listen in with interest as they carry on regardless of the stranger in their midst. The first guy, a major with a face like a weasel over a buttoned-up uniform, whines like a seven year-old. “MacIntyre, either you stop making comments about my performance in surgery or I’ll make a formal complaint!”

 

Surprise surprise, Dad. His collegue is none other than John Francis Xavier MacIntyre – aka Trapper, my partner in crime from my residency days in Boston. Trapper – who hasn’t noticed me yet - halts for a second to poke one finger at the major’s chest. “Frank, you quit giving me reasons to comment, then I’ll stop commenting. You dropped instruments a dozen times in there today. Get with the program!”

 

“The nurses I had working with me in OR were incompetent!” Frank (who I’m going to have a hard time not thinking of as The Weasel) blusters.

 

“Sure, Frank. Blame the nurses. Blame the instruments. Blame the casualties. Hell, blame the weather. Maybe the sun was in your eyes.” Trapper turns his back on Major Frank and spies me reclining at my ease, watching the entertainment. Hardly missing a beat, he holds out his hand. “Well, if it isn’t the new surgeon, my old pal Hawkeye. Hope you’ve got less thumbs than Frank here does.”

 

“It’s _Major_ Burns to you, captain!” shrieks Frank, getting a little puce round the jowls. Trapper gives him look that speaks volumes. “Frank, save the regular army baloney for the enlisted men. Better yet, take it for a walk in the minefield.”

 

Frank hisses like a prom queen and slams his way out of there – can you slam out of a tent? – and Trapper and me take a look at each other. He’s wearing fatigues and a couple of days’ growth of beard and looks like a resident at the end of a four-day shift. I reach up and we shake hands. “We meet again.”

 

“I would say it’s good to see you, but under the circumstances...” Trapper sits down on the cot next to mine and begins hauling off his boots.

 

“Did he call you _captain_?”

 

“Frank calls me lots of things. I try not to take it personally.”

 

“Did I turn up at a bad time? Because if this is inconvenient, I can be packed and on a plane home right away.”

 

Trapper regards me speculatively… Then grins. “You wish.” He shakes his head, still grinning. “Welcome to Korea. Did you bring any booze with you?”

 

And with that, Dad, things get just a little better. A friendly face in this man’s army. I didn’t get to know Trapper that well when we were both together at Boston City Hospital for nine months – I was just starting out on my residency, while he was Mr Big Shot Newly Qualified Surgeon – but we shared some laughs, and some bottles, and some nurses. And now we both wind up sharing a tent – christened the Swamp by its reluctant inhabitants - in Korea. It’s a small world.

 

Trapper himself is pretty pleased I’ve showed up. He told me he’d been sharing the tent with Frank Burns for a month and a half, which was a month and a half longer than he could stand. Frank was drafted into the army as a surgeon, but Trap says he’s more dangerous in the OR than septicaemia. Some of doctors who get drafted over here are way out of their depth: dermatologists, gynaecologists, paediatricians… The army doesn’t seem too fussy about who it trawls in. But Trap’s a damn good cutter and our CO, a one Henry Blake, isn’t half bad either. (At surgery, that is. As a CO he takes the art of indecision to new heights.) There’s a few other decent medicos here, too: Spearchucker Jones, a neurosurgeon who also bunks in the Swamp; and a gas-passer called Ugly John, who has a nose that looks like it ran into the back of an army truck a few times. Or maybe it ran into a table a few times: I’m guessing a poker table, after the way he cleaned me out at our last all-night poker game.

 

The reason I know how good (or in Frank’s case, how bad) everyone is in OR is that the army has already given me plenty of on-the-job training. Two days after I arrived they had what the army calls a push. Someone bellowed something over the camp tannoy, then before you know it everyone was running somewhere except yours truly, who didn’t have a clue what I should be doing. Trap got me by the arm and took me on a short sprint up to the area where the choppers fly in wounded. Then I had my first encounter with some of the results of this little police action.

 

I know you’ll understand, Dad, because I know now why you never talked much about what you did as an army surgeon in the Pacific back in ‘44. As we started doing triage it was like some part of me just quit and went a long way off, to hide out until after it was all over. Luckily the me that was still there seemed to function OK without it, because I worked fourteen hours in the OR putting kids more or less back together. I don’t remember much about it except how endless it seemed. I was working pretty much non-stop so it didn’t really hit me until we after we’d finished and we’d walked back to the Swamp. Trapper was talking about something and I was just sitting there on my cot with my head in my hands thinking, _I can’t do this_. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder and when I looked up he just says, “The first time is the worst.”

 

Some time later we’ve drunk our way through the bottle of scotch I brought from home, followed by a bottle of Frank’s scotch that Trapper saw him hide the last time he came back from the PX. Trapper told me that during his first experience doing triage he took a look at one casualty and threw up behind the nearest tent. He says everyone tosses their cookies sooner or later: it’s like a kind of baptism here.

 

The thing is, Dad, I can’t quite believe I _am_ here. Even though I live in a tent and wear dogtags and everything around me is khaki and there are soldiers wandering around. I keep thinking I’ll wake up from this, it’ll just be a bad dream and I’ll sit up in bed in Boston and thank my lucky stars. And when I let myself remember that there’s twelve months of this to get through, I start to get a little crazy. Twelve months in this pit? I want to start digging a tunnel back home.

 

But then I remember that you got through your tour of duty, working in field hospitals in the Pacific… And I tell myself, if you can do it, I ought to be able to. One foot in front of the other, one day at a time, right, Dad? I know I can manage it, when I look at it like that. And after all, it’s only a twelve month tour of duty. I’ll be home in time for Thanksgiving next year.

 

Meantime, I’ll look forward to hearing from you all about fall in Maine. About the colours of the trees, spreading over the hills like a magic carpet. The kids carving pumpkin lanterns and putting them out on their porches, then going trick-or-treating round the neighbourhood. The smell of apples being pressed for cider. Mist rolling in over the sea off Spruce Harbour. I’ve only been here a week and a half, but I miss home already.

 

Miss you too, Dad.

 

Happy Hallowe’en from Korea -

 

Your loving son, Hawkeye

 


End file.
